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Anyone care to comment. This sound "very" instresting. Dive Safe Robert ------- MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) -- A new test can detect if an individual is at increased risk for brain injury while scuba diving, according to a report presented here at the American Academy of Neurology meeting on Friday. Scuba divers who have a tiny opening between the upper chambers of the heart known as a patent foramen ovale are at greater risk for accumulating lesions on the brain due to decompression bubbles, according to Dr. Stefan Ries, a neurologist, and Dr. Michael Knauth, a neuroradiologist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The opening in the heart chamber allows bubbles that form in a diver's veins during decompression to escape into arterial circulation, possibly blocking blood flow in the brain and causing brain lesions. The test, which costs about $150, uses harmless microbubbles injected into a vein and a form of sonography to see if the bubbles appear in an artery in the brain. If the bubbles do appear in the brain, the chances are high that the patient has a patent foramen ovale. About a third of people have patent foramen ovale, a congenital defect that may increase the risk for a rare type of stroke. However, Ries emphasized that although divers have been known to accumulate brain lesions, it's not clear if such lesions translate into obvious brain damage. "This is difficult to tell right now. All the divers we saw reported that they felt all right," Ries said. "If there is really a risk of accumulating these lesions, one should be cautious about it." In a study of 87 recreational divers who each had made between 160 and 550 dives, Ries and colleagues injected the microbubbles and performed an ultrasound to see if the bubbles reached the arteries of the brain -- a sign of patent foramen ovale -- as well as conducted a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan to look for brain lesions that had accumulated from past dives. They found a patent foramen ovale in 25 divers, 13 of which were a significant size. The MRIs detected a total of 34 brain lesions in four divers with larger patent foramen ovales, and single brain lesions in seven divers without patent foramen ovale. If a diver knows they have a patent foramen ovale, there are things that they can do to reduce their risk of brain lesions, Ries noted. "They can take measures to protect themselves," he said. They can "dive not so long as other people, not as deep as other people, ascend more slowly, have security stops and not do so-called yo-yo dives, (where you) go up and down, and up and down." ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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